Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Found myself working on a webservice yesterday. As you can imagine my Frusto meter was pretty high yesterday :-).. got it working by the end of the day (thanks to some peer programming) but it got me thinking about how little I know about the server technologies :-(. Sure, making edits is fine but when you have to start from scratch !!!. Its a humbling experience. Found some cool tutorial sites for ASP.NET 1.1: Go here (godotnet.com)for ASP.NET 2.0: Go here (ASP.net)There are plenty of other sites that come up in a google search but to me these sites were the most helpful. Hopefully my next forray into server side coding will be better ;-).

Sunday, February 12, 2006

OK.. so now i have my J2ME application ready and working on the couple of test devices. Whats Next ?

The deployment stage of any J2ME Midlet can be a nightmarish experience specially if your MIDlet has functionality that requires it to use specific API's. So how would a developer go about ascertaining the list of devices that most likely will support his/her application. Well, the easiest thing to do is to buy all the devices out there and test the MIDlet suite on all of them. Unfortunately, this is not a very practical solution. The site maintained by Sun is decent but usually not of much help.Device manufacturers and even carriers have developer portals that do publish the specs of devices BUT, almost in all the cases you end up not finding the detailed information you are looking for. For e.g. The specs say that a device supports MMAPI 1.0 but it usually does not mention if the device the supports the complete implementation or just the audio subset.

Among Manufacturer's dev portals, Nokia's Forum Nokia site is my personal favorite, Motorola's Motocoder site also has improved leaps and bounds in the past 6 months. I will not even talk about Sony Ericsson's specs on their own devices.

Carriers too publish the specs of some of the phones they support but most of the times they link you back to the manufacturer's site. CDMA carriers are better to work with atleast here in US cause they do have and provide the most detailed info on devices when they want to :-).

There are a bunch of third party efforts that do offer comprehensive info and benchmarks on devices but most of them are charged services.

Personally, I love the TastePhone site, its free and gives me the info that I most look for in my apps. If you are J2ME developer then its a MUST visit site for you and while your there try adding your device to the ever growing list ;-)